


a Wednesday-morning kind of light

by PoeticallyIrritating



Series: Femslash February Ficlets 2015 [4]
Category: The Good Wife (TV)
Genre: F/F, look i finally caught up and i'm weak
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-24
Updated: 2015-02-24
Packaged: 2018-03-14 23:57:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3430325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PoeticallyIrritating/pseuds/PoeticallyIrritating
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kalinda's always taking someone else's calls, until she isn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a Wednesday-morning kind of light

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: sexual situations, discussion of abuse, brief mention of lesbophobia/corrective rape. (I realize this makes it sounds grim. It is not really that at all.)
> 
> Also [on tumblr](http://sapphicscience.tumblr.com/post/111988956763/a-kind-of-wednesday-morning-light-a-lana-kalinda).

Kalinda always seems to be taking someone else’s calls.

In the beginning, she comes over and watches her phone the whole time; she bites her own lips and comes jerkily against Lana’s hand with her eyes open. (Lana doesn’t understand for a long time, until Kalinda connects the dots for her. She remembers the stranger at the bar like an electric shock: _Nick_ , with violence roiling under his skin, the kind of hot-blooded coiled-spring man that thinks he can fuck the gay out of you. She squeezes Kalinda’s hand, hard, and Kalinda lets her.)

Later it’s Cary Agos, who thinks he’s special, and Lana wonders for a while if maybe he’s right. She doesn’t tell Kalinda the way he said _girlfriend_ like nothing, like the truth. She asks for more and Kalinda gives, and then she doesn’t, and then she does again—like she got lost and then found her way back.

She’s always taking someone else’s calls, and then, easy as breathing, she isn’t.

“Are you going to get that?” Lana asks, glancing at the phone on the nightstand lighting up with _Cary._

“It’s work,” says Kalinda, silencing it. “It can wait.”

“Just work?”

Kalinda’s eyes flicker across Lana’s face before she answers. “Just work.”

The thing that convinces her, really, is that there’s nothing to wait _for._ They were lying in bed, Kalinda’s hand resting sticky against Lana’s thigh, and Lana was telling a story about her sister when the phone rang. Now Kalinda settles back against the pillows and Lana curls Kalinda’s hair behind her ear, fingernails light against her scalp.

“What?” she asks, at Kalinda’s amused expression.

“You do that a lot.”

She twists the strand of hair between her fingers before answering, because, well: it’s something to do with how different and soft Kalinda looks with her hair unpinned, and something to do with her shampoo smelling like lavender, and also maybe with the quiet humming sound she sometimes makes when Lana touches her. “Yes,” she says. She leans on the _s_ and presses in close again, Kalinda’s thigh warm against hers. (Kalinda’s always run a little hot, which is the kind of thing you normally learn about a person after other things: hometown, brothers, sisters. But the two of them never seem to do anything in the right order anyway.)

“Did she make it back?”

“Hm?”

“Your sister.”

Lana blinks, disoriented. Right. “She hitched a ride with a guy who turned out to be the alternate preacher at our church. He did a sermon about the evils of communal living the next Sunday.”

Kalinda offers a chuckle that feels obligatory. She doesn’t seem capable of surprise regarding anything about Lana’s backwards hometown; the my-sister-accidentally-joined-a-cult narrative is one of the weirder ones. “Do you have a sister?” Lana asks.

Kalinda’s mouth twitches. “No,” she says, in that way that could mean anything at all. Lana tries to picture Kalinda with a family and her mind stumbles; the imagining of it feels intrusive. Instead she settles against Kalinda again, chin resting on her shoulder. When Kalinda adjusts, she draws her hair away from her neck and Lana leans in to taste the salt on her skin.

The morning creeps up on them, soft gray light turned golden by the curtains. Lana groans at the sight of it through half-closed eyes. Her body is still notched into place against Kalinda’s, and she pulls away to reclaim her own space in the bed; she’s never slept well pressed sticky against someone else’s skin.

It’s only a few hours later that she wakes, just enough before the alarm that she can shut it off before it blares. Kalinda normally seems to have some preternatural ability to keep Lana from seeing her asleep; she’s always sitting awake and watchful when Lana opens her eyes, so the weight of the body in bed next to her is startling. Lana turns to look, when she gets up. The hair at the nape of Kalinda’s neck is stuck to her skin. The rest of it is spread out on the pillow, and the shadows from the light through the window make the angles of her face more prominent, the sharp nose and chin sharper. She looks like she’s frowning in her sleep. When Lana feels a smile twitching at her lips, she turns away, puts on a robe and starts rummaging through things in the kitchen to find a new box of coffee filters. Kalinda comes in as Lana’s finishing the coffee, and she hovers in the doorway as she drinks it, toes nudging the line between carpet and tile.

“You’re not going to finish that and run, are you?”

She shrugs. “I have work.”

“Me too, but I plan on coming home after.”

Kalinda hesitates, takes a sip of her coffee. “Dinner?”

“I’ll meet you.”

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback always appreciated!


End file.
